


Doesn't Take a Cent

by ryssabeth



Series: Metropolitan Art [10]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Homeless Character, M/M, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 12:21:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/811547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryssabeth/pseuds/ryssabeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire has never accepted money for his work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doesn't Take a Cent

The Champs-Elysées Metro is crawling with people—all types, all kinds—going places. When all of this started—before he’d lost his flat, before he’d honestly decided on a course of action—he would sit at Metro Stations before school (often arriving late to class), sketching stories of people, considering options and life-choices and what made the world turn for other people.

(Grantaire’s world turns because of the physics of the matter. But his world hasn’t turned, not  _really_ , until recently.)

These days he sits and he sketches still, but instead, he takes requests (the imagination of people under sixteen is astounding, and he loves to draw what’s in their brains)—from parents and children and friends at the shelters and people who will never be friends that he’ll only ever see once.

(Or twice, in the case of the girl in the hijab, who let him draw her both times.)

A tiger is blossoming on the page today, and a young boy peers over his work, obscuring a good half of the page from Grantaire’s view. But he knows where this picture is going—he’d wanted a tiger with wings, with the tail of a dragon. Why? It doesn’t matter and that’s what the boy had wanted. ( _It doesn’t matter why_ —the words pass through him with cool fingers, soothing away the riot of his insides, tense around the ever-changing question  _why_?)

“Going somewhere special?” Grantaire asks, and with the question, the boy moves away from the page, closer to his mother, keeping a keen eye on the both of them. (And now he can see the place where the tail ought to be, and start on that before the next train pulls up.)

“We’re going to see my aunt,” the boy says, rocking on his feet. “Are you going somewhere?”

“Nope,” Grantaire replies, smearing graphite along the tiger’s belly, shading it in. “It’s a third Friday on an odd month and so here I am.”

“Don’t you have a home?”

Grantaire scales the tale, patterning it much like the Godzilla he’d done for Gavroche (pinned to his wall, crinkled from the rain that had happened that afternoon). “Of course—it’s just a very big home,” he explains, scoring harsh lines in the tiger’s mouth, teeth forming up under the tip of his pencil. “With a sky for a ceiling and pavement for a floor.” He tears the picture away from the top of the sketchpad, handing it into the boy’s waiting hands (and he sees his mother smile).

“This is so  _cool_ ,” the boy says as the train pulls into the station.

“It certainly is,” Grantaire agrees, flipping the other sheets, smoothing out the sketchpad for another day. “But I just put it on paper—technically, that’s  _yours_.”

“Wow,” is what Grantaire hears as the boy’s mother gently shoves him toward the train, where people pile off and swarm like ants, heading for the exits to go home to their families or go out for fun. The mother flutters her fingers in a wave.

Grantaire returns it with a wave of his own, picking up his things for the afternoon. (Tonight’s supposed to be a clear night—and he thinks that after he stops by the shelter down the road for supper, he might just sleep there tonight.

It is, after all, almost spring time.)

He reaches up to tug his cap over his ears—

And he smiles when his fingers touch only his hair instead.

-

Enjolras pulls the gray knit cap over his ears, his hair brushing against his cheek as it’s compressed by the fabric, and he hands out Styrofoam bowls of soup to people at the shelter, down the road from the Notre Dame.

He’s starting to learn most of the people’s names here, like here—this older man, he frequents all the ones Enjolras has been to. (He was an alcoholic, he’s said before. He’s been trying to quit— _“which is easy to do_ ,” he says,  _“when you can’t afford a drop_.”) He has a piece of paper tucked in his grip as he walks up, looking tired—but clean shaven today.

“Good evening, Mister Fauchlevent,” Enjolras greets, holding out a bowl of soup and reaching for a cup of water. “How are you?”

“I’ve been distinctly worse,” he says, setting aside his folded paper to take the bowl and the cup.

“Received something today? Good news?” Enjolras glances at the paper, even as Fauchlevent sets aside his soup and cup of water, unfolding the paper with shaking hands.

“I suppose so,” he hands the unfolded paper over to him, revealing the sketched lines of a woman, soft around the cheeks, with laughlines and hair that’s tucked behind her ear—barely long enough to do so with, but attempted nonetheless. “That’s my late wife,” he explains. “A young man—very nice, but doesn’t sleep here much, prefers bus stations, I think—sketched it for me an afternoon or two ago. Doesn’t take a single cent for it.” Enjolras thumbs the edge of the paper where a little  _R_  sits, scripted with the hanging lines at the edge of the woman’s neck.

He hands the picture back—his own hand shaking, perhaps as bad as Fauchlevent’s own.

“That’s a shame,” Enjolras says quietly. “It’s really very good.”

“That’s what I say,” the old man folds the paper back up, tucking it into the sleeve of a jacket that’s too warm for the weather now. “Good night to you, Enjolras.”

“’Night,” he murmurs, long after the man has wandered away, tapping his fingers agitatedly behind the long counter. His knuckles pop to a rhythm he doesn’t understand and his ears roar with—with something. He pulls the cap tighter over his head, backing away from the counter.

(He takes his leave quickly and with sanctions from the other volunteers, the cap warm upon his head.

And he thinks of Grantaire, asleep on a bench on the Metro 9 platform, backpack pillowed behind his head.

Enjolras swallows against a stone in his throat.)


End file.
